I want to stress that these are actual billboards, not parody “what you might expect in Vegas” billboards.

1) Get Glen!

This was only the most blatant of the many “we’ll help you sue people” adverts around Vegas. I now realise that Saul Goodman’s “Better call Saul!” adverts in Breaking Bad really weren’t an exaggeration.

2) Lee’s Discount Liquor

I think this one pretty much speaks for itself. Again, this is an actual billboard along the Las Vegas highway. I particulalry love the little detail of the Facebook logo in the top right corner.

3) Go to jail, get hugs

This represents so much about Las Vegas summarised in a single
glorious image. Bail bond loans seem to be a significant industry there. It takes a really discerning loan shark to offer free hugs though.

Those billboards alone are enough to let you recreate your own quintessential Vegas experience. Fly in, gamble, get depressed, get drunk, crash a car, sue someone, go to jail, pay your bond, get out.

And get a hug.

And it is one hell of a poster:

It was put together by mutual friend and designer Carl Knox, and is one of the coolest posters I’ve seen for a comedy/theatre/magic show in a long time.

Now we just need to finish writing the actual show…

There have been plenty of thrills and spills along the way. There have also been plenty of schedule lapses. While I have managed to keep to the one-post-per-week schedule, I didn’t necessarily manage to write them one week at a time. There have been plenty of occasions where I slipped a week or two (or occasionally even four) behind, and had to frantically scrabble to fill the backlog.

But I got there. As the 2-year anniversary of ThingsBySimon passes, we are looking at 104 weeks of semi regular posts. That’s way more than I ever thought I’d achieve.

So, to celebrate hitting two continuous years, I looked back through the archive and found some posts that turned out to be unexpectedly noteworthy.

Most popular (empirically): Quasi-Impossible Card Sculptures
Over the lifetime of the site so far, this one post has nearly 50% more views than the second most viewed one. According to the analytics, almost all those views came via people googling for impossible objects generally.

Most popular (subjectively): Prototyping via Furniture Destruction
Though it didn’t get the most views, far more people told me they liked this post than any other. I guess it just resonated well, particularly with people in creative roles that involve trial and error in some way.

Most useful: A7 Flyers – The Guerrilla Marketing Secret Weapon
Several people I know are now using A7 flyers. Several others apparently used this post to convince people they know to use A7 flyers. It may not have changed the world, but I hope seems to have helped people promote their stuff more effectively.

Most unexpectedly satisfying: Smiling in The Drizzle
As mentioned in “Sometimes You Have to Publish Something that Sucks“, there are many posts here that I’m really not that happy with. On the other hand, some of them look far better in hindsight. Smiling In the Drizzle was one that I didn’t really appreciate at the time, but in retrospect I’m really happy with how it captured the moment.

Best gratuitous beard photo: Madness? THIS IS EDINBURGH!
I think this one is pretty much self explanatory.

Here’s looking forward to year three!

(Photo by Flickr user takomabibelot, licensed under Creative Commons)

Among the many wonderful experiences at the 7th EG conference last week was an unexpected little bonus at the end.

At about 2am on the final night, I sat down in a hotel room with Jon Luni (videographer), Phillip Shepard (cellist), Charles Yang (violinist), Eric Mead (magician), and about fifteen other assorted friends, volunteers and EG conference goers all pictured above. The following video was the result:

The routine began life quite a while ago as a live performance piece. The idea of adapting it to a live collaboration of music and card manipulation had been bouncing around in my head, and I thought EG would be a great place to try it out. I contacted Phillip and Charles about providing accompaniment for it, and thanks to their enthusiasm and talent we used the piece as one of my five unusual card tricks at the conference.

Jon then came up to me afterwards and suggested he’d like to shoot a video of it. While the piece wasn’t designed for video, I figured it wouldn’t play too badly, and since Phillip and Charles were up for it we decided to take a few minutes aside to shoot it one night before getting back to the post-conference party.

What began as a quick ten-minute exercise with six of us in a hotel room eventually grew into a multiple-hour hilarious group collaboration as more people kept turning up to hold lights, give suggestions, and generally have a great time.

Had I designed the routine for video I would have approached it very differently, but the final result is still something I’m very happy to have my name on. It’s also set my brain on fire with ideas for future evolutions of the concept.

Thank you Jon, Phillip, Charles, Eric, and everyone else involved. It was wonderful little coda to an already amazing conference.

Last week I was performing at the EG conference in Monterey, California. I wasn’t presenting per se this time, but instead doing something a little unusual. Mike (the organiser) had asked a few magician “friends of EG” to present a series of close-up magic shows in between the main conference sessions.

One of the core concepts behind EG is encouraging people to be vulnerable, try something new, and give a fresh and unusual experience for everyone there. After a lot of thought about that, I decided to do a show consisting of five card tricks.

When it comes to things being new, fresh, and unusual, the phrase “five card tricks” isn’t normally the kind of thing that springs to mind. However, my plan for the show was to play off the generic image of a card trick, and go in some unusual directions with it.

For example, take the list of objects that ended up being involved in the show.

The obvious props: one deck of playing cards.

The less obvious props: a hat, a copy of Moonraker by Ian Flemming, a portable speaker system, a laptop, a spotlight (Dedo DLH4 light head), a dimmer power pack, a 110v-to-240v transformer, a long XLR cable, a universal clamp, a lighting stand, a golf club, a violinist, and a cellist.

With the exception of the golf club, violinist, and cellist (all of which were encountered at the conference), I dragged everything with me from Australia. The golf club was provided by Amy from the EG volunteer team, and the violinist and cellist were Charles Yang and Phillip Shepard respectively.

While it was a pain in the ass to carry that much gear between continents for a show that could theoretically have just been done with a deck of cards, the surprised and enthused reactions from so many people in the audience made it more than worth the effort.

I will, however, definitely be looking for a more compact lighting power supply. And maybe a collapsible golf club.

Getting here has been an interesting experience.

To cut a very long story short, last time I was in the USA I had some immigration “challenges” come up. At some point in the future I’d love to tell the whole story, but for now it’s just too much detail to go into. The short version is that everything is under control, and I’m in the USA, ready to attend the conference. But in order to get here, I’ve had to jump through far more hoops than on previous trips.

Some of these include meetings with lawyers, phone calls with the US consulate, four-hour interview ordeals at the US consulate, astoundingly vast and detailed immigration questionnaires, emergency rush-rate applications, late night international phone calls to arrange emergency letters of recommendation (thank you so, so much Jane Rosch), a thick stack of paperwork to wave convincingly at Homeland Security officials should anything go wrong, and a quantity of stress that I’m genuinely surprised hasn’t given me a hernia yet.

And all of it is so utterly, completely, unambiguously worth it.

As mentioned previously, presenting at EG last year was one of the most amazing things that I’ve ever done, ever. It was inspiring, captivating, and personally enriching in a way that I still struggle to find words to express. After an experience like that, wild horses wouldn’t stop me from coming back.

And luckily, neither did US immigration or a stress-induced hernia.

During my recent four months in Germany, it occurred to me that a site like Meetup could be a good way to, well, meet people. The showbiz people I was working with were thoroughly pleasant, but I also wanted to hang out with people interested in business, technology, industrial design, science, and all the other things I was into.

So I hit Meetup.com, made an account, and signed up to about 20 different groups. I was taking the shotgun approach; throw a whole bunch of options out there, in the hope that at least one will produce results. And they did! All kinds of group event invites started to flow in. Dinners, drinks, talks, Ignite events… plenty of things that sounded interesting to check out.

And I couldn’t go to any of them. Every single one was happening when I was working.

That was when it really hit me that performer hours are the exact inverse of office work hours. Evenings and weekends – most people’s leisure time – are exactly when I had gigs to do. A show each night, plus matinees on Saturday and Sunday. The only free time overlap was on Monday nights, and that’s not exactly prime social time for most people.

After literally about a hundred non-attendable events in a row had hit my inbox, I left the meetup groups and thought hard about my career path. Clearly a full time performance schedule was going to limit my social life in a way that I wasn’t happy with.

Luckily that’s not the only way to have a profitable and successful showbiz career. There are higher paying one-off private and corporate gigs, short full-time production runs, media and advertising projects, teaching, consulting, merchandising, and all kinds of profitable work that still allow for a balanced personal life.

I would still be happy to do the occasional intense full-time run of shows, but would never want to do it on a permanent ongoing basis. This also means that I have absolutely no desire to ever have my own big Vegas show. It would be amazing, but for me personally the costs would never be worth it.

It was quite a liberating realisation, all thanks to a brief experience with a social meetup website. Epiphanies really can come from the most unexpected places.

The show will be premiering at the upcoming Melbourne Magic Festival in July this year. It’s been an idea of Dave’s for a long time, and I’ve been working closely with him recently to help make it into a reality.

One of the recent deadlines that we faced was finalising the show image and blurb for the festival program. Festivals usually need the promo information for each show many months in advance, and this can be challenging when the show hasn’t even been written yet.

With only hours until the deadline, Dave and I sat down to hammer out a suitable promo piece within the 120 words maximum. After a lot of false starts (and many coffees), we ended up with something that worked out far better than either of us expected:

It’s that time of year again! At the Melbourne Magic Festival, Dave Lee does a show. It’s about time. If you have the time, then take the time to see this incredible performance.

If you don’t have the time, you should make the time. If you can’t make the time (because its past your bedtime), then give someone else a present; cash in your futures and buy them a ticket.

If you’ve ever had too much time, too little time, wasted time on a pastime, or cooked with thyme, this show is for you. So save the date, bring a date, clock in, watch out, and experience Dave Lee’s new show!

It’s about time.

The show is now on sale at the Melbourne Magic Festival Website. I’m deeply envious of its awesome blurb.

The act as a whole goes for 15 minutes though, which is far too long to put up online. The average viewer (myself included) isn’t going to watch a video that’s more than a few minutes long unless they’re really interested in it.

So after a lot of painful editing, I trimmed the 15 minute act down to a less-than-four-minute-long video which still does a decent job of capturing the essence of what I was doing for four months.

And so, for your not-too-time-consuming viewing pleasure:

It was a good question.

Bad Oeynhausen is a small town (population 48,000) in north western Germany. It is known for its natural hot water springs, fresh air, and population of mostly older people drawn there by the healthy environment.

As I arrived, it put me in mind of one of those fictional eastern European towns that is peaceful and idyllic by day, but terrorised by vampires and werewolves at night. Everyone I saw was elderly (the younger population clearly having been killed off by the werewolves) and the charming semi-rural environment was peaceful and quiet. Too quiet.

I checked into the small privately-owned hotel and made sure the windows were locked. Comfortable that the room was mostly werewolf-secure, I turned to the business of the night: variety theatres. Or rather, one particularly remarkable variety theatre.

Despite being a small and relatively remote town, Bad Oeynhausen is home to a quite spectacular anomaly in the world of performance art. Specifically, a variety theatre built into the shell of a 100-year old palatial bath house. As I approached it via the sprawling local park at night, keeping a watchful eye out for undead, I was eventually encountered this image:

As theatres go, that is one hell of a store-front. Inside is a 380-seat theatre, two restaurants, and a bar / nightclub. The theatre is one of five around Germany that is run by the GOP Variety chain, and boasts shows that rotate roughy every two months. The show playing when I visited was a French circus troupe that delivered a solid two hours of variety art with a slightly surreal French twist. Also, a guy doing bike flips on a trampoline. Yes; on a bicycle.

The show was decent, the house was full, and afterwards the whole venue was thriving with people eating, drinking, and enjoying the aftermath. I was wiped out from the past two weeks of travelling though, and headed back to my room to pass out.

Overall it had been a great night. I’d seen an amazing theatre, watched a thoroughly decent show, and hadn’t been killed by a werewolf.